Varied Types eBook

The general attitude of St. Francis, like that of
his Master, embodied a kind of terrible common sense.
The famous remark of the Caterpillar in “Alice
in Wonderland”—­“Why not?”
impresses us as his general motto. He could not
see why he should not be on good terms with all things.
The pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of
the Middle Ages, and all its fellows begin to look
tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of that
innocent stare. His questions were blasting and
devastating, like the questions of a child. He
would not have been afraid even of the nightmares
of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him
the world was small, not because he had any views
as to its size, but for the reason that gossiping
ladies find it small, because so many relatives were
to be found in it. If you had taken him to the
loneliest star that the madness of an astronomer can
conceive, he would have only beheld in it the features
of a new friend.

ROSTAND

When “Cyrano de Bergerac” was published,
it bore the subordinate title of a heroic comedy.
We have no tradition in English literature which would
justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there
was once a poet who called a comedy divine. By
the current modern conception, the hero has his place
in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is
systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed.
That the power of a man’s spirit might possibly
go to the length of turning a tragedy into a comedy
is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive
legends of the world are comedies, not only in the
sense that they have a happy ending, but in the sense
that they are based upon a certain optimistic assumption
that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of the
monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of
the essential disastrous character of life, when seriously
considered, connects itself with a hyper-aesthetic
view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due to
the influence of modern France, from which the great
heroic comedies of Monsieur Rostand have come.
The French genius has an instinct for remedying its
own evil work, and France gives always the best cure
for “Frenchiness.” The idea of comedy
which is held in England by the school which pays
most attention to the technical niceties of art is
a view which renders such an idea as that of heroic
comedy quite impossible. The fundamental conception
in the minds of the majority of our younger writers
is that comedy is, par excellence, a fragile
thing. It is conceived to be a conventional world
of the most absolutely delicate and gimcrack description.
Such stories as Mr. Max Beerbohm’s “Happy
Hypocrite” are conceptions which would vanish
or fall into utter nonsense if viewed by one single
degree too seriously. But great comedy, the comedy
of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must
be, taken seriously. There is nothing to which
a man must give himself up with more faith and self-abandonment